Skip to main content

I Am A Northern Lass, I Am, A Northern Lass Am I

Image
By
I'm nearly 60 (well, 58, so two years to go!) and this is my life.  I can't believe I've lived so much of it and I still have so much to do, so much to learn.  The angelic one, my daughter for the last 28 years and hopefully for many more, broke my heart when she buggered off to university broke it again when she got married, and then proceeded to sew it all back together when she developed a stronger bond with us than we'd ever had before.  It's her turn, time for her to test the water and jump in. But that doesn't mean my time is over - yet!

A little bit about me, I'll be 60 in the first week of 2022 - not that long off really - and yet I don't feel much over 30! In my head I'm only 26 - so I don't know who that old lady is who looks back at me with wrinkles and saggy skin when I glance in the mirror. 

 I'm a Northern Lass, born in a small market town on the outskirts of Liverpool, a town not sure if it belongs to Liverpool or Lancashire, a town that only just scrapes into having an M&S Food shop, without the full store, a town that survives only because it has a university and a market, though it is still stuck in the old style market with granny knickers baring all alongside the delights of giant bubble blowers, thick woolly socks and shiny bright saucepans all for under a fiver.

Not being for me, I moved as far away as I could get from marketville - well, as far away as I could get with a Scouse husband who doesn't want to leave his beloved republic of Liverpool.  We landed in The Port of the South in the North (in truth there is no port, and it's not in the South, but hey, that didn't seem to matter to the Victorians who named the place 'Southport'!) in 1990, the land of the pseudo-riche and the beach that people think is devoid of sea (it only comes in twice a day, like the sea anywhere, but people seem to think they never see it) and we hope in the next decade or so we may be accepted as locals.  The angelic one arrived in '92, followed by the scruff (Sam, a 'sprollie', also known as a collie-spaniel cross, and the angelic one's little brother) in '99.  Sadly the scruff left us in 2010, doggy dementia having got the better of him and us.

 Since then we've moved into a house we love, gained MillyMoo the Cockapoo, and occasionally Peanut the Poodle Pup (she's 6 now, but the name has stuck).

 I have a little writing and reading room, which is where I am crafting my novel and writing to you.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write What You Know, Or So They Say

By
Since school days, when my love for writing and reading started to mature under the tutelage of Mrs Hymers, I've been told to write what I know. Let's face it, though, you're not really that interested in a novel about an NHS programme manager. Silly though it sounds, I've only recently attuned to what the phrase means. It's not referring to my profession or what I do, but rather it's about writing from a place of knowing. If you know Liverpool like the back of your hand, then write about it, but if you've never been there it's maybe better to concentrate a place that you do know. However I realise there is something else about 'write what you know' and this place of knowing, and that's the role of research. It's ok for me to research something to the point where when I write about it, you think I have written about what I know. Take the photograph at the top of this post. Flowers in a jug sitting on hessian. What do you know about ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living with Mother

By
When mum was my age she refused to look after my daughter. A toddler of 3 who needed collecting from private nursery 2 days a week, and taking to the nursery at the school she'd be attending. Mum said no, that was too much to ask. She'd seen how tired grandparents got looking after their grandchildren and 'knew what it was like' for these people she observed in cafes or walking around the park. ‘It isn’t fair to ask someone of 59 to do that,’ she'd say. It's a lot to ask of old people that they look after their grandchildren. I’m 59. I’m all my mum has left. I look after her, working full time, and she's right. I’m tired looking after her. But the big difference is that as I look after her, she's only going to get older and needs more and more 'looking after'. Had my mum looked after my daughter, she would only have got older and needed less 'looking after'. For the last 5 years we've WhatsApp'd every morning, so that I know she’s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Plotting Writer

By
  When I first started to write I just wrote, let the words flow with no idea where my story was going to go, and only the hint of something in my head about what I might write. I let the ideas develop themselves. Then I came across the 'Snowflake' method which got me thinking about how I could at least have an outline of a plan. And that's what got me realising that I work much better with a plan. From there I learned about having a flatplan from Holly Dawson through a webinar she ran for Jericho Writers. I now have little prompts (you can just make them out in the photo above) which have the chapter, place, date, character list, what happens, and what the purpose of the chapter is. Using these prompts helps me to get my ideas out of my head. And more importantly they help me to keep working on my structure, making sure that everything fits together the way it needs to.  By using this approach I spotted some glaring errors in my timeline, and realised that I had one of my ...
Post a Comment
Read more